“Your Data will Only be Used in Aggregated Form,” 7 p.m., Wed., Nov. 5, a lecture by Microsoft’s Dr. Cynthia Dwork, will examine the common intuition that privacy is ensured by aggregation and show that information—and hence privacy loss—flows in mysterious ways. The presentation, which is free and open to the public, takes place Berkeley City College’s auditorium at 2050 Center St., Berkeley.

Arguing that the situation demands a mathematically rigorous treatment of privacy, the talk will introduce “differential privacy,” a field of research supporting a strong definition of privacy tailored to analysis of large data sets. The presentation is part of the “Not on the Test: The Pleasures and Uses of Mathematics” series of six public lectures in 2014–15, which are jointly presented by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and Berkeley City College (BCC). They are made possible with funding from the Simons Foundation.

Dr. Dwork is distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. She is renowned for placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation. A cornerstone of this work is differential privacy, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis. Dr. Dwork has also made seminal contributions in cryptography and distributed computing, and is a recipient of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, recognizing some of her earliest work establishing the pillars on which every fault-tolerant system has been built for decades. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Peralta Colleges

Peralta Community College District is comprised of Berkeley City College, College of Alameda, Laney College, and Merritt College. Together they provide northern Alameda County a range of educational programs and life-long learning opportunities.